A wide-ranging, thought-provoking look at faith and the nature of reality.
A call for a broader, more compassionate version of spirituality.
Despite the fact that his nonfiction debut contains a vague chart of fundamentalist Christian vintage (with “God, Heaven, Angels” on the top, for instance, and “Demons, Hell, Satan” on the bottom), Markham delves into a far more ecumenical and broad-based spiritual schema. He characterizes God as “the mysterious, underlying source of all existence” and asserts that underneath the “blitz” of the modern world—exemplified by advertisements, politics, and the nonstop news cycle—there’s a deeper level of reality, a spiritual level to which everybody is connected, whether they realize it or not: “is it not reasonable to accept the possibility that reality has a dimension that is an impenetrable void inaccessible to sense and intellect?” he asks. This mysterious level, he says, can be a help to people during times of loss or despair: “knowingly or not, they draw upon a deep reservoir of spirit that enables them to comprehend their situation in a larger perspective.” Secular readers will naturally object to being implicated in such an explicitly religious worldview, but Markham’s clear, easygoing prose emphasizes that commonality is more important than doctrine: “Realizing that we’re all in this together on this speck of dust can help us have compassion for one another even when we disagree.” While referencing a wide array of sources, such as Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God and Crane Brinton’s The Shaping of Modern Thought, Markham effectively offers a path out of what he sees as social conditioning: “we must find a way to short-circuit business as usual,” he writes. Overall, he presents a liberal, inclusive reading of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a way forward, but readers of other faiths will also find plenty of substance in these pages.
A wide-ranging, thought-provoking look at faith and the nature of reality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 82
Publisher: Shires Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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